 Roadwarrior's ultimate Toy |
| Review Date: January 29, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Larry B, |
I had an HP ZD8000 laptop that I suffered through for 3 Years. It was everything the Lenovo isn't. The HP was big, Heavy, noisy, hot to the touch, hard on the eyes, and unreliable. After the HP developed the "jailhouse bars" vertical lines on it's display and HP customer service blew it off, it was time to look for something better. Firstly NO HP PRODUCT, EVER.
The Lenovo came the closest to what I wanted. The 10 inch display is more usable than the dim fuzzy 17 incher on the HP. The keyboard is very comfortable for long sessions.
The S10 weighs in around 3 pounds. The 3 cell battery handles my portable needs. For the semifixed needs a Targus AC/DC/car power converter does the trick. The Targus powers it in the car, where I mate the S10 with a Delorme USB GPS receiver and navigate with Street Atlas.
My main use is genealogy. The S10 runs all the programs just fine. The Master Genealogist requires setting the display for more pixels than it has and bumping up and down with the cursor.
Scanning is with a Canon LIDE 35 (replaced by LIDE 100) which weighs 3.5 lbs and is a little bigger than the S10. It powers over the USB. It scans pictures and documents. It lives in the bag with the S10.
Printing is with an ancient Canon BJC-80. It is small enough to take along, when needed.
Windows XP is a real plus. I fought with Vista on my wife's new Toshiba laptop. Windows 7 will no doubt be worse. XP rules!
Broadband connection is by an ATT Ultra Express modem. A USB modem would probably be the way to go today.
I have used the S10 for close to 2 years. The new smart books might replace it. The S10 and a cell phone are more user friendly.
The S10 and scanner take up less room and weigh less than the HP 17 inch by itself. It goes everywhere. A real portable office.
The only improvement that would make the S10 better is lower cost. It is already a bargain. |
Much better than I expected.
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| Review Date: July 7, 2009 |
| Reviewer: D. Davis, Texas |
| This is a well made laptop - it is not real fast, but it is real inexpensive. - It has a ton of hard disk - the keyboard is small enought that I some times mistype but it runs big applications from my recliner and I mess with it 2 to 4 hours a day. |
Easily overloooked, great little netbook in a crowded market
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| Review Date: July 2, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Peter Nom De Guerre, New York, NY |
First thing's first: when it comes to netbook shopping, you have a LOT of options. Asus, Acer, Lenovo, HP, MSI, Samsung -- to name a few -- have all thrown their hats into the game (seems Apple is the only holdout). So it can be a little bewildering to someone who's looking for a $300-$400 machine and doesn't know where to start.
The Lenovo S10 is a solid choice for a bunch of reasons. I'll start with the least important: aesthetics. It's (for the most part) a solidly-built little unit, and it looks great in black or white (or one of the other funky color combos around). It feels sturdy and substantial, the screen is bright and attractive, and the trackpad, while small, is well-placed and responsive.
[One minor note about build quality: the cool silver circles on either side of the S10 can pop off if it suffers a drop/bump, making it look much less pretty than it is. So be careful.]
As for performance, if you go with the default, $300-400 model, you're probably going to be getting a 1.60 Ghz Intel Atom processor, which is fine for word processing, web surfing, some light (emphasis on LIGHT) photo editing and retouching, music management, and so on. However, I've done some video encoding on this thing (inserting subtitles and the like), and boy does it chug. I mean, it'll get processor-intensive tasks done, but it'll take its sweet time.
One really nice thing about the S10 is that adding a stick of RAM (HIGHLY recommended -- and cheap ($25)) and swapping the HD is a breeze. The bottom of the netbook opens easily, and you have immediate access to all its yummy innards.
A couple of issues bother me though: The first big fault with this device is (1) its wonky wireless card which occasionally loses a signal for no reason. I've tested every element of my home network (running a D-Link DIR-655 router and serving a NAS and two laptops, including this one), and the fault lies squarely with the S10's default wireless card. The second is (2) it gets hot. The fan turns on, and it gets a little loud for so small a laptop. Don't get me wrong, it's not irritating-loud or noticeably loud, but if you're in a small, silent room, you'll hear it (and feel it if it's on your lap).
All that being said, if you're in the market for a cheap netbook that gets the job done, the Lenovo S10 is as good an entry as any other. Add a stick of RAM, and you can easily get it running dual boot. I've played with the MSI Wind (and got one for my sister for Christmas) and the Eee (a friend has it), and the S10 feels just a smidge better than both. But ultimately, your best bet is to play with each and decide then. |
Great item
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| Review Date: May 25, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Howard Thomas, GA United States |
| Having first purchased a Dell 9 inch and having to return it because the wi-fi did not work, I thought a little larger screen would be better. I am very satisfied with the Lenovo 10 inch netbook. I use this as a computer away from home. Light weight and great for travel. |
Excellent netbook
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| Review Date: May 22, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Totally Tom, Mass. USA |
I looked at several brands of netbook before deciding on the Lenovo. I am very happy with my decision. While the keyboard is slightly smaller than other 10" netbooks, it is certainly usable with a little adjustment (I am a touch-typer). The only bothersome oddity is the right shift key, as others have mentioned. That being said, the feel of the keyboard is much better than others in my opinion. In addition a new model is out now (the S10-2) with a better keyboard layout.
The place where the Lenovo shines above others, in my opinion, is in its fit and finish. Others seem to lack the attention to detail that this model has. For example, the keyboard on the HPs (I saw this several times) is mounded up on the left side and the shiny plastic over the screen is rippled. Annoying. And a lot of times the Asus keyboards registered false (or no) keystrokes. The MSI Winds like to tip over backwards. But the Lenovo is pretty solidly built, and it looks tastefully subdued like a good business machine should. Pretty nice if that's your thing.
I found that it's processor and hard drive are plenty fast for me even with "only" 1 GB of RAM installed. But I'm not a gamer and don't care to watch videos on it, so I don't really push the limits. The screen is pretty nice and is the full 1024x600.
The model I received included the Splash Top quick boot OS. This allows you to boot an appliance-like OS which has a browser (a rebranded and stripped down Firefox 2) a media player and a few other tools. It's nice but it disables features like plugins for the browser, or the ability to download files, so there are limits to what you can do with it. Great if you want to check news & weather or quickly get directions on the way out the door.
If you're interested, here's how the hard drive was partitioned: 115 GB primary partition formatted FAT32 contained the Windows XP OS. I'm pretty sure FAT32 was chosen instead of the newer NTFS because it allows Splash Top to access media files you have obtained and stored using Windows. A second 30 GB partition formated NTFS shows up as drive D: in Windows, and there is a 3rd partition (hidden in Windows) used to store disk images for the One Key Restore system.
I wanted to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix, but the manual advises not to mess with the 115 or 15 GB partitions because it may cause the One Key Restore to stop working. So I decided to use part of the 30 GB partition to install Ubuntu. This actually seems to work out pretty well because Ubuntu has no problem easily accessing the FAT32 main partition natively. So you can store all your music, movies, photos and working files on this large partition and use them either in Windows or Ubuntu. Makes for a pretty good setup.
The install of Ubuntu was painless. Just follow the instructions on the Ubuntu site and it does pretty much the rest for you. Networking, sleep and hibernate, screen brightness and volume and all the other function keys worked without having to do any tweaking. Only the internal mic needs some help to get working, but instructions are available if you look for them on the web. The nice think about UNR is that it makes really good use of the limited screen area on these smaller computer. It also boots faster than Windows and seems generally snappier.
I would certainly recommend this model to anyone in the market for a netbook. |
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